Prohibits transfer of firearm by dealer or private party if Department of State Police is unable to determine whether recipient is qualified to receive firearm.

Limited Government

As the Oregon State law now stands, if the State cannot show within one business day that you should NOT be able to purchase a firearm, the seller can go ahead with the transfer to you. Federal law is 3 days. So today, when the State Police Firearms Check system is “down” or otherwise malfunctioning or if you received an “initial denial” which results in your check going into "pending" status waiting for investigation into the question raised, you can be delayed only a short time. Currently about 1% of background checks run in Oregon – 2,000 out of roughly 200,000 checks run per year, result in an “initial denial” and a "pending" status. State Police investigation records show that 90% + of those are for non-prohibited persons – a “false positive.” This can occur as a result of having a name similar to someone else, incomplete records in another state, or the dealer entering info inccorrectly. With HB 4147, if the FICS unit does not finish their investigation and positively say that you CAN purchase the firearm, you will be delayed – indefinitely. With HB 4147, the 1800 people per year who are not prohibited but are initially denied, will be denied forever or until FICS figures out the problem du jour, whichever comes first. This is a clearly unconstitutional prohibition of exercise of a constitutional right by law abiding people. Statistics from http://www.oregon.gov/osp/ID/Pages/Firearms-Denial-Information-and-Reports.aspx.

Further, this is being introduced in an off-year legislative session which were implemented for purposes of small housekeeping work, not introducing controversial and impactful new changes, and scheduled for a hearing the very first week of session, giving the public very little time to provide input. This methodology is offensive.